Biography

2016 Season

Choi "Pirean" Jun-sik was a challenger Korean player when he joined Team Impulse as a mid laner in January of 2016, as part of a completely rebuilt roster. Facing visa problems for the first few weeks of play, their roster was unstable until week 4 of the Spring Season. After some early success with their substitute rosters, especially with Seraph in top lane, TIP ended the season in 9th place, losing a 5-13 record tiebreaker to Renegades based on their head-to-head matchup.

In the Promotion Tournament, Team Impulse requalified for the Summer Season with a 3-1 win over the Challenger team Apex Gaming; however, on May 8th they were faced with a competitive ruling banning them from continued participation in the LCS due to not paying their players on time and also not having proper contracts in place with players. The team was also fined $20,000 by Riot. Along with Mash and Gate, Pirean joined the organization that purchased Team Impulse's NA LCS Summer Season seed, Phoenix1. Faced with visa problems for intended starting jungler Inori, the team was forced to add a substitute jungler Zentinel to their roster, who competed for them for the first three weeks. In that time, Phoenix1 lost all of their series and won only two games total, cementing themselves in last place, behind Echo Fox. Their winless streak continued after Inori's return and through their first series of the fifth week, at which point they had a 3-18 game record and 0-9 series record. In the second series of that week, however, they picked up their first series win against Apex Gaming, with a comeback 2-1 victory after dropping the first game. After this first win, their record improved significantly, and in the second half of the season they went a combined 5-4 - not enough to keep them out of relegations, but enough to surpass both Echo Fox and NRG in the standings for a top seed in the promotion tournament, where they requalified for the LCS with an easy 3-0 win over Echo Fox.